Rudolph turns the big 4-0!

Posted: Sunday, November 28, 2004

By Patricia BrennanSpecial to The Washington Post

The story of the little reindeer with the shining red nose returns at 8 p.m. Wednesday on CBS, a charming tale of overcoming adversity and achieving success that has entertained children and their parents for 40 years - the longest-running holiday animation ever.

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The song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," written by Johnny Marks, was a huge hit when it was released in 1949.

It was Marks' Manhattan neighbor, TV producer Arthur Rankin Jr., who suggested that they turn the tune into an animated special using his new stop-motion technique, AniMagic.

"Johnny was reluctant at first," Rankin said, "because he had this one big hit and he was afraid of jeopardizing it."

As it turned out, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" became the first of several holiday songs that Marks would write, many of which eventually became incorporated into television specials by Rankin and his partner, Jules Bass.

But Rankin could not promise Marks the AniMagic animation would be well-received. "There are no guarantees in television," he said.

AniMagic was a technique involving building figures with modeling clay. "For each figure, there's a person off-camera who is in charge of its movements, and a storyboard," Rankin said. "So if they know a character is going to lift a toy, they move the figure a little bit. It's amazing that it has held up as well as it has. Computers do all that now."

Happily, when "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" aired in 1964, it turned out to be a blockbuster. "Right away, every other song we wanted was available to us. We had good credentials," Rankin said.

Rankin and Bass bought the rights to most of the holiday songs of the time. Using stop-motion and traditional animation, Rankin-Bass went on to make about three dozen television specials (including "Frosty the Snowman," "The Little Drummer Boy" and "Peter Cottontail"), a dozen series (including "ThunderCats") and another dozen feature films (including "The Mad Monster Party," which Rankin described as "a Halloween cult film").

Still, "Rudolph" always led the way. In song and on television, children and their parents loved the little guy who had been taunted by other reindeer. The story's moral - that a child could overcome being different - always had been the basis for "Rudolph," even in his first incarnation, a small book offered free by the Montgomery Ward catalog and department store company.

Chicago-based Montgomery Ward had been buying and distributing coloring books each holiday season. In 1939, the company decided to create its own booklet. Copywriter Robert L. May, a 34-year-old father (whom Rankin said he met briefly), set out to do the job.

May knew - as did most Americans then - that Clement Moore had created a poem, "A Visit From St. Nicholas," in 1822 as a Christmas gift for his children. The poem, also known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," described an elfin Santa Claus using a team of "eight tiny rein-deer" to pull his gift-laden sleigh.

So May, who had been a shy, small boy and who never forgot the taunts he had suffered, decided to create a ninth reindeer. This one would be physically different - with a glowing red nose.

After rejecting such names as Rollo and Reginald, May settled on Rudolph, and began to write a poem about his little hero.

He tested it on his 4-year-old daughter, Barbara, who was enthralled. His bosses were a little less thrilled, worrying a red nose might be associated with drunkards.

A friend accompanied May to Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo, drew some deer with red noses and the bosses' concerns were allayed. That Christmas, the company distributed 2.4 million copies of the new Rudolph story.

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" also was printed commercially as a book and became a nine-minute cartoon. But the little reindeer didn't fly into history until songwriter Marks, who happened to be May's brother-in-law, developed the lyrics and melody.